Rapid City and Great Falls

Gillespie, Macbeth, McCaffrey and I left Korea in a gooney bird and were flown back to Tachikawa Airbase. A day or two later we were bundled into a Military Air Transport Service (MATS) C-97 heading for Travis AFB in California. There were bucket seats along the sides of the fuselage and rows of composite wooden folding chairs in the middle — the kind you sit on at outdoor church functions. After the aircraft was jammed full with a load that included dependents heading for the States, many of them crying kids, a forklift picked up a large structure that contained a pair of latrines and jammed it in through the door. We were trapped.

Our first stop was Midway Island where we landed in the evening. After a short delay a forklift rolled up and removed the latrines, allowing us to get out of the airplane. We grabbed snacks in the snack bar and wandered around for a while. I remember watching some albatrosses — real gooney birds — run across the ground and flap their wings, trying to get airborne. Sometimes they'd make it and sometimes they'd barely break ground and crash.

Next stop was Hickham AFB on Oahu. After we sat through the forklift and latrine routine and finally got out of the airplane we were told we had a couple hours before takeoff, so the four of us wandered around the flightline. We stumbled across a shower: just a couple stalls out in the boonies by themselves. I felt filthy, so I stripped and showered — in cold water — and then used my T-shirt for a towel. Looking back, that cold shower always stands out in my memory as the high spot of the trip home. My wet T-shirt probably still is hanging over the pipe I left it on.

Finally we got to Travis. I was exhausted, but I didn't try to spend the night on the base. Autumn was at Omena with Clint, the beautiful son I'd never seen. I got a ride to San Francisco International, bought a ticket for Grand Rapids, Michigan, where my folks were to pick me up, snoozed in the airport until time to board, and was on my way home.

My folks drove me from Grand Rapids up to Omena, a trip that gave us a chance to become reacquainted. They dropped me at the house in Omena and headed back to Ferndale, leaving me with my beautiful wife and beautiful son.

For the first time Autumn and I had enough money to buy a new car, so my dad, with Autumn's help, had selected a brand new Plymouth which was waiting behind the house at Omena. Ernestine was away, I don't remember why, but Autumn, baby Clint, and I had the main house to ourselves for the best part of a month, for a wonderful vacation.

Mexico Beach, Florida

Finally we packed Clint into the Plymouth and headed for Tyndall AFB outside Panama City, Florida, where I had to report by June 7th. In the meantime I'd received promotion orders and was able to put on my silver bars. Although  the Panama City area was pretty crowded we managed to find a cottage at Mexico Beach, about 35 miles down the road from Tyndall. We were in a row of houses just off the beach. Between the Macbeths, who had a house next door, and the other Korea returnees in the neighborhood, we were able to carpool to our classes, and the families could hang out on the beach on nice days. Here's Clint getting his first taste of salt water, which he saw a lot of later on.

In the Tyndall controllers' school we learned to position fighters to shoot down bombers with rockets. The process involved a lot of in-your-head arithmetic, but compared with flying it was pretty routine, even boring stuff.

We were required to stay current as pilots, so we'd bum flying time. One evening some guy who was flying a T33, had an engine failure, couldn't get the engine started again, glided down and landed his airplane, gear up, on the edge of the water west of Mexico Beach. I didn't see it happen, but according to the story he got out of the cockpit and simply walked home.

One night I was in the back seat of a T33. We were at 35,000 feet when the guy in front decided to head home. He nosed over, pointed us almost straight down, and we started descending at a great rate. I watched the altimeter unwind. Finally, as we busted through 10,000 feet, still dropping like a stone. I said, "Check your altimeter." He instantly popped the dive brakes and we must have pulled seven g's in an abrupt pull-up. It was a dark night, and you couldn't quite see the ocean. I'll never know if he was pulling my chain and planned to pull up, or if we'd have gone straight into the water.

Rapid City, South Dakota

Finally we packed up and drove to Rapid City, South Dakota, where I reported in at the 740th Aircraft Control and Warning (AC&W) squadron, the Air Defense Command (ADC) radar site on Ellsworth AFB. We spent a couple nights in a motel, did some house hunting, and found a duplex in a housing project on a mesa more or less in the center of town called Signal Hill. The view was magnificent, and the place was comfortable. There were two problems, though. The people next door liked to make pickled hearts and the smell would seep through the wall. And when I'd come back from a duty shift in the winter I always had to stop at the bottom of the hill and put chains on the car. You simply couldn't make it up without them.

Ellsworth AFB was (and still is) a Strategic Air Command (SAC) base. When I arrived, in July, 1954 SAC was flying B-36's out of the base. The airplane was a monster — the largest prop-driven aircraft ever built. In August, shortly after we got there, a B-36 crashed and burned off the end of the runway. I remember seeing the incredible column of smoke when I came on the base in the morning.

ADC had two units on Ellsworth: the 54th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron (FIS), flying F-86D's (known familiarly as "the dog"), and the 740th AC&W Squadron. The 54th owned a gooney bird (C-47) which nobody in the fighter squadron was eager to fly, so Captain Don Wahl the 740th's operations officer, the only other pilot in the outfit, and I spent a lot of time flying that airplane. Don had flown the Berlin Airlift and he was an extremely competent pilot with a couple thousand hours in the goon.

We made a flight one winter to Loring AFB outside Limestone, Maine to pick up a prisoner. When we arrived at Loring, about one o'clock in the morning, it was 35 degrees below zero, so we diluted the engine oil with gasoline to make sure we could start the engines again. We went into base ops and Don called the brig to arrange a pickup for the prisoner. The sergeant on duty told Don he'd have to contact the major who was the top cop on the base, so he called the major and woke him up. The major told Don he wasn't about to get up in the middle of the night to sign a release for the guy. Don said, "Well, it may be the middle of the night but I'm flying." The major said, "Go ahead and fly."

So we got back in the goon, took off, climbed to altitude and set the autopilot. Neither of us had slept for at least twenty four hours. I woke up to find the sun shining brightly, looked over at Don, who was asleep in the left seat, looked down and saw the crew chief crouching behind the seats with a map, worried but evidently afraid to wake us up. We didn't know quite where we were, so I started cranking the radio frequency until I heard a call sign. The radio in that airplane wouldn't reach out farther than about 50 miles, so I looked up the call sign and found we were close to Scott AFB in Illinois. I looked north toward the horizon and, sure enough, in the haze I could just make out the lower sweep of Lake Michigan.

On another winter trip we were hauling a load of stuff over to the west coast. Don't remember our exact destination, but we had to cross the Sierras. It was night and we were on the airways in weather. Minimum en-route altitude for the airway segment we were on was 12,000 feet. We were picking up rime ice on the wings that we couldn't quite get rid of with the deicers and we found we couldn't hold 12,000. I went back to the cargo hold, getting ready to open a door and start shoving stuff out. But suddenly I got a call from Don that we'd swung (passed) the radio beacon we were heading for and we could descend to 8,000 feet. As we dropped down the ice began to melt off the wings.

The intercept control job involved vectoring an F-86 to a position where it could fire its rockets to bring down an incoming bomber with the least risk to the fighter. To do that properly you had to bring the fighter in on a heading that was ninety degrees to the heading of the bomber, on a track that, were the two aircraft to continue, would result in a collision. You had to take into consideration the wind direction and velocity, airspeed of the incoming bomber and the desired airspeed of the interceptor, do some arithmetic, and on a small piece of plastic draw two lines: a baseline, which you'd lay over the bomber's flight path and then, with the help of a protractor, draw an intersecting line for the path of the interceptor. You'd then put the plastic against the plan-position-indicator (PPI) and vector the interceptor so that he'd stay on the intersecting line, heading 90 degrees to the heading of the bomber. If the interceptor started getting ahead of the line you'd slow him down a bit, and if he fell behind you'd speed him up. I finally got tired of doing the arithmetic and designed a circular slide rule that would do the job quickly and give me a visual angle to draw the intercept line on the plastic positioner. I wrote a paper on the subject and Headquarters 29th Air Division published it as a manual.

I've described the three week trip I made to RAND corporation in January 1956 in "Correspondence With Ben." That trip was my first introduction to computers, which I found fascinating.

Part way through our time at Rapid City we bought a two bedroom house with a creek running through the back yard. It was a fun place to live, but it was on the edge of town, toward the hills, and I'm pretty sure it was swept away in the 1972 Black Hills flood. Some weekends we'd take dusty Nemo road and drive up into Black Hills National Forest.

The happiest thing that happened at Rapid City was Paul's arrival on March 1, 1956.

An obnoxious lieutenant colonel from division headquarters used to fly in from Great Falls and demand a "full stop GCI to GCA." (A ground-controlled intercept to ground-controlled approach.) That wasn't a big deal, but the guy's radio manner was clearly designed to tick you off. One of the controllers once said, "I'll put him on a heading of one-two-zero and he'll get a full stop," referring to the fact that there was a mesa out to the northwest that stuck up pretty far.

One night I was on duty when the colonel, who'd been visiting the fighter squadron, took off on his way back to Great Falls. The weather was pretty nasty, so he was on instrument flight rules and I was monitoring his flight path. When he was about 50 miles out I called him for some reason and didn't get an answer. I called again, and still didn't get an answer. Finally I said, "If you can read me, squawk two." I was referring to IFF (identification, friend or foe), which used a transponder in the aircraft. With IFF on, the aircraft would appear as a blip on your scope about three times the size of a normal radar return. There were three modes for the transponder and on mode II (squawk two) the aircraft would show up as a big double blip on the radar scope.

As soon as I told the aircraft to squawk two, the double blip appeared on my scope, so I knew he was reading my transmissions, but I also was sure his radio transmitter had failed. I told him he had a problem, turned him around, gave him a GCI to GCA, and got him back on the ground. About a half hour later he came into the darkened operations room and shook my hand. We both realized that since his radio couldn't transmit, and he didn't know that, he'd have been in serious trouble at his destination. Shortly after this incident I got orders reassigning me to operations plans in 29th Air Division headquarters on Malmstrom AFB in Great Falls, Montana.

Great Falls, Montana

We were lucky enough to find a retiring master sergeant who wanted to buy our Rapid City house, and at Malmstrom we were lucky enough to get a unit in a quadruplex in base housing. It was a two-story unit, and in many ways minimal, but it saved us money that we needed now that we had two kids.

Most of my early work at Great Falls was planning for the arrival of fighter units at two new bases: Glasgow AFB in Montana and Minot AFB in North Dakota. The fiascoes associated with the construction of those bases were almost beyond belief.

At Glasgow the taxpayers spent around $200,000 to plant grass, but the Pentagon planners forgot to arrange for water for the newly installed grass, so it died. We were in the process of building a standard control tower on the base, but before the tower was finished, the Pentagon decided the base would be transferred to Strategic Air Command (SAC). We did a bit of drawing and calculating and discovered that the SAC bombers' tails were tall enough that the tower under construction wouldn't be able to see past them to the runway. We couldn't cancel the contract for the first tower, so a new tower began going up along with the old, useless, tower. The original plan from Washington was for alert hangers for F86's, but part way through their construction the Pentagon decided to switch the squadron to F100's. The hangers under construction would be too short, but we couldn't modify the contract. We had to bring in a second contractor to add bulges to the front of the hangers so they could accept the F100's.

At Minot we found that walls in the new, not yet occupied barracks were cracking as a result of the dry climate. To solve the problem a couple airmen were detailed to spend their days going through the barracks flushing toilets in order to keep at least some water in the air. In accordance with the plans from Washington, poles were going up with power lines spaced 12 inches apart, even though local practice was to space them 18 inches apart. Early on during this development a wind came up, slapped the power lines together, and blew out most of the lights on the base. We couldn't stop the original contract, so we had to have a second contractor come along behind the first contractor, moving the 12 inch spaced lines out to 18 inches.

But I was saved from insanity by being introduced to the L20, the Canadian Beaver, the airplane I'd ridden from K2 up to the Naktong gunnery range in Korea. A captain named Eddie Doherty, who, for some reason, went by the nickname "Tom," checked me out in the airplane, and I started flying it into dirt strips at radar sites all along the "highline" — Montana, North Dakota, and Southern Canada. In the winter Tom taught me to fly the L20 with skis. Before long I was rated as an instructor pilot in the airplane.

I also checked out in the C45, a twin-engine Beechcraft with a fuselage short enough to make it very prone to ground-looping (Google it). One winter night another pilot and I were landing a C45 at Billings, Montana. Snow was piled high on both sides of the runway and there was a slight left crosswind. The other guy was flying and I was in the right seat. We touched down, rolled down the runway, and as soon as the tail came down we did a 90 degree ground loop to the left, but it happened just as we came to an intersecting runway, and we finished our landing roll on the new runway. Eventually the headquarters got a twin-engine Cessna U3, familiarly known as the "Blue Canoe." I checked out in that too. It was a fun airplane to fly, but the L20 always was my favorite.

The most experienced pilot around was Captain Chester Cooper. Chet had at least 20,000 hours of flying time in all sorts of aircraft, and, of course, he was the general's pilot when the general wanted to go someplace. I flew with Chet many times and learned a lot from him. Malmstrom was a SAC base with a very long runway for bombers. One day Chet was taxiing out in an L20. He called the tower and asked for permission to take off from a nearby taxiway intersection. The length of the runway from that intersection was about ten times what it took to get the L20 airborne but the tower denied his request and made him taxi another mile and a half to the end of the runway. He started taxiing faster and faster, became airborne, flew past the tower windows, and landed on the taxiway at the end of the runway. There was a big flap over the incident, but the general told the base commander he'd slapped Chet's hand, and Chet was home free.

Nearly a year after we'd settled in at Malmstrom I was sent to Squadron Officer School (SOS) at Maxwell AFB outside Montgomery, Alabama, or, as Clint called it, "Moveabama." It was a four month school, so the family got to go along. When we got to Montgomery we were lucky enough to find a duplex out in the country. The family in the other unit was there for the school too, so he and I were able to carpool. The only problem with the duplex was cockroaches, but Autumn cleaned our side until it was spotless. The roaches moved next door. Pregnant with Bob, Autumn got some cleaning help from a girl who was attending a ramshackle "separate but equal" school down the road where they taught black girls to do housework. Every night, when we came out to get in our cars, there'd be KKK literature under the wipers.

Squadron Officer School taught strategy, tactics, doctrine, the duties of the service branches in combat, etc. They also taught clear writing. It had been traditional in the services, as in all government agencies (in most it still is — check out your local National Weather Service radio station) to write in a stilted, third person style. Example: "It is felt that…" The Air Force was trying hard to kill that style, and SOS was at the forefront of the effort.

In the midst of all this, on a joyful July 16th, Robert B. Lewis arrived.

We were organized into "flights." Each flight had from 12 to 15 people. Mine had 14. One of our members, Cecil Lefevers, was a very good musician. He got four of us who were interested together and we formed a quartet. We were good and we sang at various functions, including graduation. The only song I remember from that group is the Whiffenpoof Song. It still can bring me to tears.

Three writing projects were assigned to the 500-plus students in class 57-B: an air power paper, a staff study, and an operations plan. The papers were in competition and were judged by the faculty of the school. At a graduation dinner the winners were announced. I won the air power paper and the staff study. Evidently that caught the attention of retired General Orvil Anderson who had been involved in planning the bombing campaign in Germany during WW II. During the Korean war General Anderson suggested publicly that we take out Russia's five nuclear research sites by any means, covert or overt, and give the United States a twenty year breathing period before the Soviets could get back into the nuclear game. Harry Truman didn't like that, and Anderson was forced to retire. Now he was editor of the Air Force Historical Foundation's magazine, "The Air Force Historian." He decided to publish my air power paper in the magazine and he invited me to come by for a chat. He did most of the talking during that "chat," and as I said in my online essay, "Recessional," he said something I'll never forget: " We have people coming to power who believe we can win wars with technology, but technology is never sufficient. Wars are won by the minds of men, not their technology." I think it depends on what you mean by "win." With the nuclear technology available nowadays a nation can be obliterated in short order by a mindless fanatic like an Iranian Ayatollah. Whether that constitutes a "win" depends on your point of view.

Back at Malmstrom I spent some time working out emergency recovery patterns and procedures for the bases where our fighters were located. Unfortunately, a couple guys in the 29th Fighter Squadron — one of them a good friend — called the patterns "vertigo boxes," and the plan never was implemented. A couple years later, when I was at Beausejour in Canada, during a major exercise a nasty front moved in unexpectedly and caught a bunch of fighters in the air, low on fuel. They had to recover at the bases nearest them, a situation for which they'd never planned. In the resulting confusion, two airplanes were lost, along with two pilots and two radar back-seat guys. One of the pilots was the friend who'd knocked the recovery plan that might have saved his butt.

On April 25, 1958 I was promoted to captain and was able to put on my silver tracks. Three months later I got orders to attend disaster control school at Lowry AFB outside Denver for 33 days. By now the Soviets were well armed with nuclear weapons, and the Air Force realized we needed to do what we could to make our air defenses more survivable. Disaster control school taught chemical, biological, and radiological warfare and defenses. Once I got back from the school I was assigned as disaster control officer for the headquarters. Disaster control, later named "disaster preparedness" was a small field with a limited number of officers, and I worked in this field off and on for the rest of my air force career.

In February 1959 I was sent to Sundance Air Force Station for an inspection. The radar site was to be powered by a small reactor — a PM-1 transportable nuclear power plant. I went over their disaster plans and was in the reactor control room when, at about one o'clock in the morning the reactor was brought up to criticality and the plant started generating electricity. It was tradition to take a one dollar bill, known as a short snorter, and have everyone present at a reactor's startup sign it. I still have that bill.

A mountain stream ran through the site. Cooling water for the reactor was pulled from the stream and, after cleaning, dumped back into the stream. Since it came down from the mountains the stream had a high level of natural radioactivity. In what was far from an unusual case of government over-regulation, the site was required to reduce the cooling water's radioactivity well below the stream's natural level before dumping it back into the stream.

Four months after my trip to Sundance I got orders to go to the 916th Aircraft Control and Warning squadron at Beausejour, Manitoba as an intercept controller. Tom was on his way, and it was an inauspicious time for the move, but we had no choice.